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Xyratex takes over Lustre distributed filesystem from Oracle

Oracle has got out of the Lustre business and has sold the parallel distributed filesystem's logo, trademark, web site and intellectual property to UK-based high-performance storage vendor Xyratex. Lustre is an open source, GPLv2-licensed filesystem which first appeared in 2003 with a client/server-based distributed architecture.

Oracle acquired it as part of its purchase of Sun Microsystems. Despite Oracle's assurances that it would continue to develop Lustre, the high performance computing arena, where the filesystem had built its reputation, was not one where Oracle actively competed. Organisations like OpenSFS were formed to try and protect Lustre and other open scalable filesystems; Xyratex is a promoter of OpenSFS along with others such as Intel, LLNL, and Cray. Xyratex has now acquired the Lustre assets.

The move was welcomed by OpenSFS CEO Norm Morse who said: "This acquisition gives Xyratex a great opportunity in concert with other members of the Lustre community to continue the stability needed to ensure Lustre remains a vital part of HPC going forward". Others welcomed the move for Lustre, which places it in the hands of a company that specialises in high performance computing. No transaction value was given for the acquisition.

In a blog post, senior director of the Clusterstor business at Xyratex, said the company saw Lustre as a key part of the company's business, noting: "we do not offer solutions based on other file systems and because of this our business is indelibly intertwined with the health and vibrancy of the Lustre community". He said that it would be planning for a future working with the community, not only for the forthcoming Lustre 2.4 community release, but beyond. Xyratex is also taking on responsibility for supporting existing Lustre customers.